Seen from far enough off, a shanty town of flattened kerosene tins and mud daub can appear like some glittering Shangri-la. The ageing satellite of Wirral City looked like a complex jewel on a black velvet show pad. An observer at the Met Station on Earth's Moon, if there was any hardy soul still batting on that ash heap, would see the sprawling, wheel satellite as the last triumph of Technical Man. Only a close passer would see the derelict sections, the areas where robot faultfinders had finally jacked it in and let meteorite penetration have its way.
By any standard, it was still a very impressive artefact. Surrounded by its frill of solar collectors-spread out like fields of asphodel--it was visible from Earth as a large, bluish star. Mankind, having set his thumb mark on his planet, had also aspired to altering the ancient star map itself.
That same lunar observer, might see the huge satellite as a village, surrounded by cultivated strips. He would not be far off target. The socio-political organization, which had evolved on the Earth's first and last Ultimate Condominium was feudal. Inside the advanced, technical, life support system, the human supercargo had worked out a plan for living, which was in line with community structures way back through the millennia.
Ownership of the solar strips was vested partly in the ruling family group of Maynell and to a lesser extent in certain families of freetraders. These property owners had the right by statute to trade the energy that came their way in return for goods and services.
The Maynells, the Stedmans, the Honeybones and other leading freetrader families had gotten it all buttoned up. Social stability was the order of the day. Being of vigorous and energetic stock, hand picked by the founding fathers, they had ploughed their theoretical furrows with enthusiasm for some generations.
Nobody could pack a bag and leave to seek fortune elsewhere. Nobody wanted a shoot out in the fragile envelope of the spinning wheel. Events rested. The frail seedpot drifted on in the spaceways. There was an uneasy truce. Those who had, were convinced that the organization was natural and just. Those who had not, were not pushed into revolt by hunger. They had tranquillizers on demand and a library of 3-D Actualities that would run for half a century on continuous showing without a repeat.
Ten thousand people gave Wirral City the status of a small town. Management of resources created employment. Daily life revolved round the two imperative tasks of harvesting the free flow of solar energy and of controlling the overspill. In a manner of speaking, the city was afloat on a sea of honey and might choke in it without due care. They could fry in their metal pan, like so many eggs on a griddle.
There was smith's work refashioning the metal artefacts in general use, from small hand tools to the very fabric of the satellite. There was a textile division, where existing fabrics were revamped to changing use and where fibres from the hydroponic spreads were spun, woven and dyed. There were cultivators and technicians and craftsmen, all the skills needed to keep a township fed and clothed and housed, in the special circumstances of being an offshore island, out of communication with the mainland.
For over five centuries, the Condominium of Wirral City had kept station in a parking orbit, high above the estuary of the River Dee. In parallel terms it had been in business from the Renaissance to the beginning of the Technical Revolution. Just as the average man of the Twentieth Century would be hard pressed to say how his ancestors of the Fifteenth Century considered their world, so the people of the satellite had only a sketchy idea of the first colonists who had set up their unique enclave.
Much filtering through the myth and image building screens, set up by the local historians, had blurred the accounts of how and why the first settlers had made the one-way trip. It was now generally accepted that George Maynell was the Twenty-first Century founder; that he had been a man of enormous wealth and had commissioned the satellite; that he had offered sanctuary to certain groups of workers on certain terms; that those terms amounted to a benevolent dictatorship; that those terms were the basis of the printed Constitution which governed and regulated daily life on the satellite.
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